Visual aids help people understand information. Conveying information to or among groups of people may require creating visual presentations embodying the information. Graphics application programs, such as the Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentation application, have helped automate creating such visual presentations. Such graphics application programs allow users to convey information more efficiently and effectively by putting that information in an easily understandable format.
A graphic is a visual idea representation, such as a diagram or other drawing. A graphic is typically composed of several graphical elements (e.g. shown in a presentation data view) that represent content embodying the idea, such as, for example, a bulleted list (e.g. shown in a semantic data view). Each graphical element is a part of the displayed graphic. A graphical element can have both textual characteristics and graphical characteristics. Graphical characteristics generally refer to pictorial or other graphical element visual features. Textual characteristics generally refer to the written matter within the graphical element. Depending on the information and the audience, a graphics application program user generally determines a specific graphic that will best teach or convey the underlying information.
In some situations, the user may need to know whether they have an element selected in the semantic data view or the presentation data view because commands may work on only a subset of the presentation or semantic data visible in one of the views. Consequently, confusion may result because the user does not see updates in both locations (e.g. the semantic data view and the presentation data view). Thus, the conventional strategy does not allow the user to see how commands may apply to their presentation and semantic data simultaneously. Furthermore, the conventional strategy does not enable the user to see semantic and presentation data both selected at the same time, so that the user can more easily match the data between the views.